The world may seem orderly, but randomness and chaos shape everything in the universe, from enormous galaxies all the way down to subatomic particles. Take a chilly window sheeting over with ice: even ...

Mathematicians have finally solved a geometry problem that has puzzled the field for decades. By wiggling a needle around while spinning it, you can minimize the amount of space it moves through, ...

Mathematicians from New York University and the University of British Columbia have resolved a decades-old geometric problem, the Kakeya conjecture in 3D, which studies the shape left behind by a ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Much of mathematics is driven by intuition, by a deep-rooted sense of what should be true. But sometimes instinct can lead a ...

After over three decades, five academic studies and one thousand pages, a team led by Yale Professor Sam Raskin has solved a part of what some consider math’s “Rosetta Stone.” Raskin led a nine-person ...

At first glance, the problem seems ridiculously simple. And yet experts have been searching for a solution in vain for decades. According to mathematician Jeffrey Lagarias, number theorist Shizuo ...

The artificial intelligence (AI) program DeepMind has gotten closer to proving a math conjecture that's bedeviled mathematicians for decades and revealed another new conjecture that may unravel how ...

An attempt at tackling the intractable Collatz conjecture is a “noble failure” demonstrating the promise of automated reasoning techniques. The computer scientist Marijn Heule is always on the lookout ...